by D A Madigan
Franklin stared at the TV. "What... is that why no one's come in to work today?"
Dan strongly suspected Franklin wasn't as ignorant of what was going on outside as he professed; otherwise, why would he be so terrified of being put outside? Why had he been so convinced there were 'looters' coming to break into his store? He'd probably gotten a pretty damn good look at what was going on outside before he'd pulled those metal security gates down... and he'd probably been secretly relieved to have a whole store of food and other goodies all to himself, too.
So why had he let them in, when Sheila had pretended to be a service tech? Dan suspected he hadn't been able to help himself. Franklin was the sort who loved to bitch and whine; the opportunity to scream at a service tech in person for the failings of that tech's employer was probably not one he could pass up.
Plus, like nearly everyone else, Franklin was addicted to the internet. The thought that someone might come in and make it work for him... he hadn't been able to resist that.
Well, they'd all be going through withdrawal pains in the pretty near future, no doubt.
Now, Sheila brushed her hands together. "Welcome to the zombie apocalypse," she said. "All right. Got anything in the store we could use for mattresses? Blankets? Because we're gonna be here a while."
PART TWO
THE FEUD
"We're the ones that are gonna run this joint whether you like it or don't like it and if you don't like it you better come and take the issue up with us."
- OLE ANDERSON
i.
"We got to do something," Vivian said. "We can't just let Skip die."
Sheila just nodded. They were both up on the roof, over in the corner that gave the best view up and down Bardstown Road. They each had a pair of binoculars, although they weren't very good binoculars, as they'd come from the 4A - Toys, Games and Novelties - aisle.
A couple of days before, Skip had mentioned casually that there were only five doses of insulin left, so if anyone could think of any particular services he could perform for the group before he had to take a stroll outside, they should speak up now.
That was just like Skip. Not making a big deal about it, not asking anyone to risk anything for his sake, just letting them know the situation.
That the store's little remaining insulin had stayed refrigerated this long was due entirely to Franklin M. Morabito. The store had an old emergency generator that ran off tanks of propane; Franklin was the only one of them who knew all of the finicky generator's various persnickety behaviors and idiosyncrasies and could keep it running reliably. And, at that, they'd been very lucky; just prior to Z Day, the store had taken delivery of several dozen propane tanks -- generators and propane being a reliable profit item with winter, and the threat of winter black outs, coming on.
Not that Franklin had cooperated with anything even remotely like good grace. Even now, three weeks after Z Day, the man still muttered direly about looters and his authority and the consequences for all of them when civil order was restored. But he was deathly afraid of being put outside -- with good reason.
Civil order was not being restored.
Looking down from the roof, Sheila and Vivian were staring out over a sea of the walking dead. Well, more shambling than walking, at this point -- Bardstown Road in front of the store, for example, was filled with an aimlessly milling crowd of obviously mindless zombies, wandering in circles, moaning like the damned were supposed to moan, and stinking to high heaven.
It was obvious that some kind of metabolic process was continuing with them. The dead's hair had continued to grow. Many of them had lank, knotted, rancid looking swatches of filthy tangles hanging down to their shoulders now, or past.
Zombie fingernails also continued to grow. Many of those below had long, yellowed, curving nails. Others were more jagged and claw-like; these were those who had broken their nails off scrabbling at something -- or someone -- relatively recently.
And, as previously mentioned, their stench was enough to turn the stomach of a veteran garbageman.
Vivian wondered if they had reached their maximum numbers as yet. Well, of course, they hadn't... there were still living people, as yet unassimilated into the zombie horde, in the store below. But were they the last living survivors in all of Louisville?
"We ain't gonna be able to even get up to Kroger's to check out they drugs if we don't do somethin' about all these creatures first," Vivian said.
In her heart, she felt a great and welling pity for all of them... or, rather, for the people they had once been. Killed before their times, and denied even a decent Christian burial, cursed by Satan to walk the earth as some kinda horrible ghouls attacking the living... the righteous and unrighteous alike were down there in that mindless, murderous legion of the damned.
But she was also (very rationally) terrified of them. If they had any idea that there were living folk inside this building, they might well batter down its concrete walls to get at them. Which was why she and Sheila, and any of the others who came up on the roof, were so careful not to call attention to themselves.
Vivian was also deeply ashamed of herself. All her fine words on that first crazy morning with Sheila, about how once she got the kids somewhere safe, she was going to go off and save her nana, too... and then they'd gotten here... and she just couldn't bring herself to do it. She told herself she had to take care of Jerome's kids... but she knew Sheila and Dan and Skip would look after them. The real reason was, she was just too afraid to leave the store. Her nana lived in Shawnee Park, all the way down on the west side of Louisville... a good long piece away, especially in a city where every road was jammed with pile ups and abandoned cars.
So she'd just stayed here. And now, nana was almost certainly dead... or worse.
She felt bad about that. But there weren't nothin' she could do about it. The undead were all around them, too -- on all four sides of the Walgreen's. Nobody could get out... it would be hard to even get to Skip's helicopter, on the far side of the back parking lot. And Skip said he'd be surprised if there was enough fuel left in the copter for ten minutes flyin'.
"Well," Vivian said, speaking in the low murmur that all of them had mastered for use on the rooftop, "if we cain't give 'em a decent burial, we can at least cremate 'em. They close enough packed that if we just light one of 'em up, the rest'll probably go up too."
Sheila just grunted. It was a tactic... or strategy?... she got them confused... that Dan had suggested and that they had all discussed over the past several weeks. The dead out in the streets did tend to pack together... although, strangely, they never tripped over each other or ran into each other; it was as if all of them were somehow individual cells within some greater organism that kept them all coordinated on some basic level, which was a pretty scary thought that Sheila did not like to dwell on, thank you very much.
But, anyway, the foul smelling things did seem to run in herds and like to be in close proximity to each other, which meant, if they could find a way to lob a torch into the middle of the crowd, chances were pretty good that the fire would spread fast, one zombie to another.
But fire was a tricky thing. If the fire spread into a ring all around the Walgreen's -- might it heat the walls up enough to cause them harm? Use up enough oxygen to suffocate them inside the store? Even as it was, the smell of the dead drifting in through the ventilation ducts was enough to... well, be a powerful help in food conservation, to say the least.
And thinking about conservation of resources... the insulin was just the first thing to start running out, of course. Over the past three weeks they'd eaten everything in the refrigerated cases, and started to make serious inroads into the canned food. The bread was nearly all gone, even with keeping what was left in the refrigerators and scraping incipient mold off every day. Sheila's very rough calculations showed they might have food enough -- counting dry cereal and the various energy bars stocked with the candy at the check-out counters as 'food' -- for another six weeks, m
aybe.
But they'd run out of propane in another two weeks, tops.
And water. Once the genny went down, the running water wouldn't work anymore. They'd been boiling everything they drew from the pipes, using the microwave... Dan simply assumed that by now the metro sanitation system wasn't working very well any more, and boiling water was a necessary precaution. Without power, they'd have to start drinking the bottled water... and that would last them all maybe a week. Ten days at the most.
Without their single working flush toilet, the store would drop an order of magnitude on the habitability scale, too. Oh, they could crap and piss into buckets and haul the buckets up here and dump them over the side, but even leaving aside what a pain in the ass all that would be, it seemed to Sheila that there was a very real chance the horde of undead down below might figure out someone was living inside the building once buckets of human waste started being dumped on a daily basis off the roof.
Maybe not. There was no indication that zombies had any reasoning capacity at all... but you never knew.
"It's wildly unlikely that the Kroger's somehow kept its power on, too," Sheila murmured, finally. It was frustrating; Kroger's was no more than a hundred feet up Bardstown from the Walgreen's, but due to intervening buildings, she couldn't see the store at all. "If they have any insulin, it won't have been refrigerated for several weeks, most likely. Skip says that an unopened bottle of insulin can be good for up to a year... so we might still get lucky, if no one else has looted the place."
Skip had gotten wildly UNlucky, coming to this Walgreen's with them. According to Franklin, the store should have gotten its next drug shipment, including fresh stocks of insulin... the day after Z Day. At the time Z Day had occurred, this particular Walgreen's was very low on a great many drugs... including insulin.
Fortunately, they had had plenty of cold and flu medicine, and Vicki hadn't even needed a Z-pack, just a lot of Formula 44, to get her through the minor cold she'd had when they'd arrived. Now she, and the other two, much younger kids, were doing as well as could be expected. But everyone in the store was taking multivitamins every day, and they'd run out of those eventually, too.
But Skip's need was the most pressing. If he was going to stay among the living, they had to get new stocks of insulin. Soon. And new stocks of a lot of stuff would be necessary not much further down the line.
Which meant, someone had to get up the street and see what was going on at Kroger's.
"If we're going to try lighting them up, we should do it after dark," Sheila said, finally. "If we can clear the street, then maybe one of us would have a chance to sneak up to Kroger's and scout a little."
It was a desperate plan, but Sheila couldn't think of anything else to try. None of them could.
Without saying anything out loud, both women turned to head back to the trapdoor that gave access down into the store. They detoured, Vivian going right, Sheila going left, around the large TV aerial that Dan and Skip had set up near the trapdoor after Galaxy Cable had stopped broadcasting fifteen days or so before this. Now they could get maybe four channels -- all of them broadcasting nothing but the Emergency Broadcast Network logo, occasionally interrupted by Emergency Broadcasts that had grown increasingly more bizarre over the past three weeks.
Vivian climbed down the metal ladder attached to the wall, landing in the narrow janitor's closet. She stepped out into the store's back room so Sheila could descend; there was only room in that closet for one person at a time. She was careful, going down the ladder, not to touch the black AV cord taped to the back of it that snaked up and down, connecting the TV aerial to the back of the TV.
The small flat screen, which had been in Franklin's office, had been relocated into the little mini lobby near the former drug counter. The mini lobby had had about half a dozen wooden chairs with thin cushions built in for customers to use while they waited; those chairs, along with some lawn furniture that had been on clearance when all hell broke loose, were pretty much the entirety of the furniture available to them in the store.
Now, Vivian saw everyone in the store was seated in chairs, staring at the small flat screen TV.
"Another emergency broadcast," Dan said, kissing Sheila briefly as she walked over to where he was sitting. He'd gotten up to let her sit down. Dan was nice like that. "Some scientist broadcast-ing from a lab in Atlanta, I think."
Sheila put her hand on over his, where he had rested it on her shoulder as he stood behind her. "Is it that crazy guy with the eye patch who wants us to eat zombies?"
Dan grinned. "The 'we are down to the line' guy? Nah. He was broadcasting from a 'highly classified location'. This one seems at least marginally sane."
She was very aware of the solidity of him; of the warmth of his skin, touching hers, of his aroma. One thing the store lacked was anything remotely like privacy. That, and the constant need to keep an eye on Franklin to ensure he didn't get up to any mischief, while helping Vivian and Skip watch over the kids, had kept intimacy between her and Dan to a frustrating minimum for the last three weeks. She missed it...
She smiled as she watched Vivian fussing with Skip, who had also gotten up to offer her his chair. After a second, she conceded and sat down, and Skip stood closely behind her, much like Dan was standing closely behind Sheila herself. There was something going on between the two of them, and Sheila was glad for it. The world had gone straight to hell on a hockey puck, as Sheila's rather eccentric father might have put it... having somebody else made it all a little bit easier.
"-- some kind of anaerobic organism that behaves as a virus in some models and a bacteria in others," the rather tired looking fellow on the TV was saying. His head was completely hairless, like some sufferers from alopecia that Sheila had seen... he didn't even have eyebrows. "As best I can determine with the instruments I have left to me, it can lie dormant for months, maybe years, in the bloodstream. As long as the blood continues to be oxygenated by normal metabolic processes, that's all it does... lie dormant. But when the blood ceases to be oxygenated... which is to say, when the infected person dies... this organism spreads quickly. It takes over the metabolism on a cellular level, cell by cell. The body reanimates quickly, although the microorganism cannot do anything to reactivate the higher brain function."
He paused, picked up a glass of not particularly clean looking water, sipped from it. "Sorry. Hoarse... I think I may have a cold. Been eating tinned food for several weeks now, and I'm sure my immune system is low due to vitamin deficiencies. Good thing we're well stocked on meds. Pity we don't have any Vitamin C... " His face twisted into a grimace he probably thought was a smile. "All right. The microorganism is rather like a mold culture, one that grows at hyperaccelerated rates within a non-oxygenated body. It has only one driving force... reproduction, which it does through infection. It senses uninfected creatures... the living... and it attacks them, spreading itself. I suspect its primary method of sensing the uninfected it preys on is through the body's sense of smell."
He shook his head. "As any survivors out there who may be seeing or hearing this probably already know, the microorganism has no real metabolic weaknesses. The brain is not active in these creatures, so the classic Hollywood movie technique of shooting or hitting these things in the head has no effect on them. They have no real vital organs. The microorganism animates each individual cell in the body. They need not eat, or breathe, or sleep. However, the fact that the microorganism is anaerobic... that it needs an oxygen deprived environment to thrive... tends to make these reanimated corpses extremely flammable. Fire may be our only real hope of destroying them. To that extent, I have recommended to the provisional Cabinet that the military be armed with flame throwers and sent in to clear zombie infestations from those areas that may still be salvageable..."
Skip chuckled. "So if we can just get these zombies to lay down and let us fit oxygen masks to their faces..."
"Wouldn't matter if they don't breathe," Dan said. "We need some agent that would
forcibly carry oxygen molecules into the bloodstream. And if they don't breathe..."
"They scream," Vivian pointed out. "They out there right now moanin' and groanin' like a buncha Tea Party white folks just got told they tax money is goin' to black Welfare queens drivin' Cadillacs to the sto' to buy sirloin steak. If they make a noise with they mouths, they gotta breathe in and out, right?"
Sheila thought about that. "So... if we could get a zombie into a room and then flood the room with oxygen..."
"Make it a lot easier to set it on fire or blow it up," Skip added, dryly. "Maybe we should just stick with that."
"No," Sheila said, "but if this... thing, this virus, whatever, that's driving them to attack us, really hates oxygen... Franklin, I've seen several tanks behind the druggist's counter. Are those oxygen tanks?"
"For prescription CPAP machines," Franklin said. "Without a proper prescription, I cannot authorize..." His hectoring voice trailed off as he realized every other adult was staring at him. "Well," he said, huffily, "just do as you like, then."
Sheila looked down at Dan. He put his hand over hers and squeezed, lightly.
"We need some way to test it," Skip said, thoughtfully...
ii.
They could not come up with any feasible way to test it.
There were many suggestions. One was to lure a single zombie into the store's back room and then blast it with oxygen from one of the tanks. Franklin very nearly had an aneurysm at the thought, and for once Sheila found herself actually agreeing with the man. First, how could you guarantee luring in only one? Second, these things were strong and all but indestructible, and frighteningly fast. If the oxygen did nothing to it, then the only effective weapon against it was fire -- and using fire inside a building was always extremely hazardous. Fire inside the building that was the only thing keeping them alive... no, no, no. Not an option. Not a sane or reasonable one, anyway.
